On this date in 1863, West Virginia became a loyal northern state in the western mountains of rebellious, slaveholding Virginia, amid America's worst tragedy, the ghastly Civil War.
This holiday rouses feelings - from memories of Yankee sympathies that caused mountaineers to break from the South, to the wistful attachment of West Virginians for the hills of home.
Napoleon said, "Mountaineers always love their country," and most West Virginians agree. The upended topography and nearness of nature become part of each native's psyche.
In the Mountain State, you are never far from a shadowy ravine, a curving trail, a looming hillside, a gurgling creek, a highland field. Around any bend you may meet a deer or raccoon or chipmunk. The rugged topography resists development, so green privacy is ever-present, soothing the soul. It's one of the state's prized features.
As usual, we reprint some thoughts for West Virginia's birthday:
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"Great things are done when men and mountains meet." - mystical English poet William Blake, "Songs of Experience"
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"Summon every energy of your mind and heart and strength, and let the traitors who desecrate our borders see, and let history in all time record it, there was one green spot - one Swiss canton - one Scottish highland - one county of Kent - one province of Vendee - where unyielding patriotism rallied, and gathered, and stood, and won a noble triumph." - Wheeling Intelligencer, April 30, 1861, Editor Archibald Campbell, urging mountaineers to split from seceding Virginia and remain loyal to the North
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"This was no land for lily-fingered men, who bowed and scraped and danced a neat quadrille.... Our state was whelped in time of strife, and cut its teeth upon a cannonball." - from "Rhymes of a Mountaineer," by Roy Lee Harmon, West Virginia poet laureate
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"Rippling mountain streams that glisten in my dreams / Peaceful valleys that I used to roam / When the dusk is falling, I hear the bob-white calling / in my West Virginia home. / Green hills in the spring, a bluejay on the wing / rhododendrom blooming everywhere / Gentle folks who greet you like old friends when they meet you / There's no place that can compare." - from "West Virginia's Home to Me," a song by former Daily Mail Publisher Lyell Clay
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"Whether or not mountaineers were always free, they were almost always poor." - John Alexander Williams, "West Virginia: A History," 1976
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"It was a pleasing tho' dreadful sight to see mountains and hills as if piled one upon another." - pioneer traveler Robert Fallum, 1671 journal entry after crossing the Blue Ridge and reaching the border of what is now West Virginia
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"There are 'colonies' within the United States. West Virginia is in a sense a microcosm of such a colony. It is partially owned and effectively controlled by coal, power and railroad companies, which in turn are controlled by vast financial interests of the East and Middle West. The state Legislature answers to the beck and call of those interests. Strip mining, the curse of several states, has easy going in West Virginia. Black lung cancer takes an awful toll among miners.... The 'mother' interests that own the wealth of West Virginia appear secure." - U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in "Points of Rebellion," 1969
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"Rough mountains rise all about, beautiful in their bleak ugliness. . . . Yet they have their moods. On gray days they lie heavy and sullen, but on sunny mornings they are dizzy with color. . . . They are gashed everywhere with watercourses, roaring rivers, bubbling creeks. Along these you plod, a crawling midge, while ever the towering mountains shut you in. Now and then you top a ridge and look about. Miles and miles of billowing peaks, miles and miles of color softly melting into color. . . ." - James M. Cain, author of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," writing in 1923 in The Nation as he covered the West Virginia mine war
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"In mountains there is freedom. The Earth is perfect everywhere, except where man comes with his torment." - Friedrich Schiller, German poet (1759-1805)
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"This is a desolate place - steep hills dotted with tiny shacks and rows of coke ovens, rising straight from the wicked, wicked river, full of rapids." - poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, letter to her husband as she traveled to Charleston in a 1924 reading tour
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"Where the mountain river flows / and the rhododendron grows / is the land of all the lands. . . ." - from "Hill Daughter," by Louise McNeill Pease, West Virginia poet laureate
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"If you've never been to West Virginia, it's hard to imagine the topography. This might help: If you have an egg carton in your fridge, take it out and turn it over. Those mountains in West Virginia are just like the peaks you see which hold the eggs, and there are deep ravines between each peak just like the spaces between the egg chambers." - Pat LaMarche, Huffington Post, March 26, 2013
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"Here is hard-core unemployment, widespread and chronic; here is a region of shacks and hovels for housing; here are cliffs and ravines without standing room for a cow or chickens. In this region of steep mountains, a person is exceptionally fortunate if he is able to hack out two or three 10-foot rows of land for potatoes or beans." - Erskine Caldwell, describing Mingo, McDowell and Wyoming counties in "Around About America," 1964
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"Oh the green rolling hills of West Virginia / are the nearest thing to heaven that I know. / Tho' the times are sad and drear, and I cannot linger here / They will keep me and never let me go." - from "The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia," a song by Utah Phillips
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"A place where all you need to be is what you are. . . . A past that in the present somehow makes you feel secure." - "Leaving West Virginia," a Kathy Mattea song
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"On the map, my state is probably the funniest-looking state in the Union; it resembles a pork chop with the narrow end splayed." - John Knowles, in the West Virginia volume of Holiday magazine's American Panorama series, 1960
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"The state is one of the most mountainous in the country; sometimes it is called the "little Switzerland' of America, and I once heard an irreverent local citizen call it the "Afghanistan of the United States.' " - John Gunther, describing West Virginia in <I>Inside USA<P>, 1947
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"Almost Heaven, West Virginia . . . I hear her voice, in the morning hours she calls me. The radio reminds me of my home far away. And driving down the road, I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday. . ." - from "Take Me Home, Country Roads," by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert and John Denver, one of four official state songs
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"There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice. Injunctions and guns, like morphia, produce a temporary quiet. Then the pain, agonizing and more severe, comes again. So it is with West Virginia . . . Medieval West Virginia! . . . With all its grim men and women; When I get to the other side, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia." - labor organizer Mother Jones, in her autobiography, quoted by Eve Merriam in "Growing Up Female in America"
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"You might be considered a West Virginian if . . . (1) Your front porch collapses and more than six dogs are killed . . . (2) Less than half the cars you own actually run . . . (3) Your diploma contains the words "Trucking Institute' . . . (4) Your wife's hairdo has ever been caught in a ceiling fan . . . (5) You have a rag for a gas cap . . . (6) Your brother-in-law is also your uncle." - the late Gazette columnist James Dent
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"I am the hills. I will sing your song. . . . There is a permanence about my people, and strength. For hands that tamed a wilderness cannot die. . . ." - from "Sing, Appalachia." by West Virginia poet Muriel Dressler
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"In the dead of the night / In the still and the quiet / I slip away like a bird in flight / back to those hills . . ." - from "West Virginia, O My Home," a song by Hazel Dickens, a Mercer County native.
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"O the West Virginia Hills, how majestic and how grand, with their summits bathed in glory like our Prince Immanuel's Land! . . ." - from "The West Virginia Hills," another official state song
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"There is music in the flashing streams / and joy in the fields of daffodils / And laughter through the happy valleys / of my home among the hills." - from "My Home Among the Hills," another official state song
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"The population of this vast mountain region is divided into two distinct classes, as far removed in character and environment as it is possible for people to be. First, there are those who live in fertile valleys along the rivers and the railways, with the very best religious and educational advantages, and who are equal in intelligence and refinement to any people in America. [People of the second group] do not live in these favored valleys, but far back from the main lines of travel in small clearings by the watercourses, almost entirely removed from the outside world, with few advantages for learning and few opportunities for improvement. The extreme poor live 'back of beyond,' beyond the towering mountains, locked in narrow coves, without teachers, without physicians, without comforts and conveniences." - the Rev. Homer McMillan, "Unfinished Tasks of the Southern Presbyterian Church," 1922
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"Mountain communities share other features besides the obvious topographic ones. For one thing, they often have a second-class status that keeps them at the margin of national agendas. Terms like 'hillbilly' aren't limited to Appalachia. Thai hill tribes and Ecuadorian highlanders, among others, face the same prejudice. Infrastructural improvements like roads, not to mention communications, lag in mountain areas, and so do investments in education and jobs. Still, flatlanders appropriate mountain resources in the name of everyone, as in, 'Mountain forests and streams and energy belong to everyone.' " - Atlantic Monthly, May 2000